As today's integrated circuit industry is based primarily on the use of components with Manhattan geometries (i.e., 45° and 90° bends), a challenge exists for incorporating the layout of non-Manhattan planar optical components with conventional electronic components. In particular, typical optical components comprise elements such as splitters/combiners, waveguides, arrayed waveguide structures, semiconductor optical amplifiers, Mach-Zehnder interferometers, modulators, and the like, all requiring the use of bends and various angle geometries.
As the photonic industry continues to mature, the need will arise to be able to fabricate these components using standard IC tools and processing techniques. In particular, the mask generation process will become a crucial step for realizing optical components using the same IC tools and processing as used in today's microelectronics industry.
Additionally, a need exists in the optical simulation and modeling industry to develop appropriate tools for efficiently importing and exporting optical structures without sacrificing the quality of the optical surfaces. A direct import of a non-Manhattan optical component from optical simulation software into an IC layout tool results in the conversion of the original non-Manhattan shape into low resolution discrete polygons. The currently available IC layout software packages have limitations on the number of vertices they can use in order to generate the imported optical components. In the prior art, certain layout software packages utilized for either optical or IC applications are limited to only 4096 vertices, as a result of their 12-bit operations. The limited number of vertices results in a modification of the optical component. This modification of the optical component during its import to the IC mask layout software can result in unexpected optical behavior that is only realized after the fabrication of the optical component. If the photonics industry is to benefit from the high yield manufacturing model of the IC industry, the import/export limitations of the optical layout software packages needs to be addressed. There also remains the problem of providing a high resolution conversion of discrete polygon representations from set of input generating curves from mathematical equations.